Špilberk, the Habsburgs' harshest prison

Brno's hilltop citadel held leaders of the Bohemian revolt after 1620, and later became the Habsburg monarchy's most feared prison. Italian Carbonari were locked in its cells from 1822; the poet Silvio Pellico's account of his eight years there, My Prisons, made Špilberk a byword for repression across Europe. Polish rebels of 1846 followed. The prison was dissolved in 1855.